The present invention relates to self-service food displays for use in restaurants, cafeterias, convenience stores, quick service food marts, airports, shopping malls or other locations where fast foods are served. More particularly, it relates to a new and improved countertop display station including a warming oven and oven display rack for storing pre-cooked and preheated foods in certain merchandising containers at elevated temperatures for extended periods of time without any significant deterioration in food quality.
Self-service displays are especially desirable to fast food convenience store operators primarily because once loaded, they generally do not further require operator attention. This permits the store owner to offer a larger variety of goods without increasing the associated labor costs, because personnel are not required to be on hand to personally serve the customers for these products. Numerous self-service displays have been developed for presenting various foods to fast food customers. Many displays have included metal or plastic racks which arrange the products in columns and rows set at a downwardly slanted angle, such that when the front-most item in a column is removed, the remaining items in that column will move downwardly and forwardly to re-face themselves to the customer. In this manner, all of the positions of product at the front of the rack are completely filled. This self-facing feature, provided by angling the front, customer-facing side of each row downwardly so that product is fed by gravity to the front of the display rack for removal by the customer has long been shown to improve display appearance and promote stock rotation promoting freshness. Store owner attention is not required until all of the items stored in that particular column or row have been depleted.
The store owner, in accordance with these prior art racks, simply needs to set up the self-service displays prior to opening the establishment or during slow periods. Thereafter, the salespersons may generally leave them all day or re-stock them from time to time, at a convenient time, as necessary without requiring the store owner to hire additional employees. Various display racks of this type are well known for use in refrigerated environments for dispensing milk, beer and soda, as well as, for displaying snack items at room temperature on a counter.
The angle feed display racks for food items used in the past have generally not been used in hot oven contexts for customer self-service for several reasons. Store owners are wary of placing hot ovens within the reach of a customer. Most prior art gravity feeding, self-facing, self-service merchandise displays include forward stop structures that extend substantially within the product removal face of the display racks. In a hot oven environment or heated enclosure environment, these heated metallic surfaces in the product removal face are likely to burn the customers. Accordingly, where heated countertop displays have been provided, they have usually been kept behind the counter, away from the customer, thereby requiring a cashier or salesperson to leave the cash register unattended in order to remove items from the oven, which is undesirable.
Another major reason why hot food displays have not been widely used is that for most foods, particularly convenience foods including sandwiches having a bun or bread portion, the food quality tends to deteriorate rapidly in a heated environment. The bread portions tend to loose their texture and freshness in a short period of time. Prior efforts to retard or avoid deterioration in food quality have included providing warming ovens with controlled humidity enclosures. These displays tend to be rather expensive and generally food quality deterioration is still observed in an undesirably short period of time, especially with bread products.
Other efforts to slow the loss in freshness or quality have included the use of microwaves to rapidly reheat convenience food items at the point of sale. Once again, this creates the need for sales personnel to interrupt their cashier function to place the foods in microwaving ovens and to handle the foods to the customer for sale. The microwaving step takes time and often some customers don't want to wait, thereby removing the convenience aspect of the fast foods.
More recently, improvements in the food packaging industry have led to the development of new and improved merchandising containers having special barrier properties which permit pre-heated and pre-cooked foods to be stored at elevated temperatures for extended periods of time of up to several hours. Foods packaged in these specialty containers retain their original moisture and texture and do not become either hard or soggy after prolonged exposure to elevated temperatures. The new and improved merchandising containers are described in commonly assigned, co-pending applications U.S. Ser. No. 451,433 filed Dec. 15, 1989 and U.S. Ser. No. 687,266 filed Apr. 18, 1991.
As described in these pending applications, the merchandising containers are one-piece hinged boxes or containers molded from formed synthetic thermoplastic materials. The containers are generally clear or see-through and are sized and shaped to merchandise and store ready-to-eat food products in a manner which allows the food products to be consumed immediately without assembly, heating or other handling procedures. These packages may be provided in generally any desired size and shape. Nevertheless, these merchandising containers generally include a lower receptacle tray portion and a cover portion having a peripheral lip that imparts an over-locking lid characteristic to provide a tight interference fit of the cover portion over the tray receptacle portion. A locking assembly is provided to keep the container closed when only the cover portion of the container is grasped by the customer when a container is being lifted and transported. Containers of this type are now capable of providing long-term, high quality heated storage for food products as hamburger sandwiches, hot dog sandwiches, breakfast items such as sausage and biscuit combinations, as well as, other sandwiches and the like, incorporating meats and or cheeses within bread, a bun or other dough-like food item. It has long been desired to provide self-service merchandising of food products of this type for use at various convenience store locations.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved self-service countertop display for heated foods packaged in the new and improved merchandising food packages referred to above.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a new and improved countertop hot oven display and self-service food station which presents pre-cooked and pre-heated food packages to the customer in a manner which provides a minimum risk of burning the customer when the customer removes product from the heated display.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a new and improved hot oven countertop display for self service environments capable of accommodating and displaying a variety of packaged pre-cooked and preheated self service convenience foods in a controlled temperature environment which does not require a means for controlling the humidity of said environment.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a neat, organized and clean self-service countertop food display station at which a customer may prepare pre-cooked and pre-heated food products for immediate consumption without requiring handling or other serving assistance by convenience store personnel.